John Wycliffe's
Religious Doctrines
GORDONLEFF
John Wycliffe was the major English Reformer of the Middle Ages.
But he was not the 'Morning Star' of the Reformation if by that is
meant its direct forerunner. Wycliffe's voice, for all its distinctiveness, was not a lone voice; and its advocacy was less of new doctrines
or institutional forms than of spiritual renewal by a return to first
apostolic principles exemplified in Christ's life and teachings.
Moreover, Wycliffe's main influence was felt not among his Lollard
followers in England, even if they did continue into the sixteenth
century, but upon John Hus and his followers in Bohemia, where the
demand for religious reform fused with the demand for political
independence into a wider movement.
Wycliffe's outlook is best understood as a highly individual, often
idiosyncratic, development of what may be called an apostolic view of
Christian truth, going back, in the form in which he received it, to the
apostolic groups of the early twelfth century. 1 It took its inspiration
from the image of Christ, derived from the Bible, of a possessionless,
homeless wanderer, renouncing all dominion over men and things,
and devoting himself to preaching salvation and spiritual ministration. His life, and that of his disciples, were the norm for all
Christians, above all those in priestly orders, from the pope
downwards. True Christian discipleship therefore meant a church
without temporalities or jurisdiction, and a priesthood distinguished
solely by its spiritual qualities of life in emulating Christ's life of
temporal renunciation and preaching the gospel. Hence their only
identity was a spiritual one as members of Christ's sacramental life.
In the circumstances of the time, it contrasted increasingly with the
contemporary church's growing visible identity in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries through the continuing acquisition of temporalities and jurisdictions renounced by Christ. By Wycliffe's time it had
become the contrast between an apostolic and a non-, or at least
post-apostolic church. 2
The distinction represented a new critical attitude to the contemporary church which, in its visible corporate form as a privileged
hierarchy, was no longer to be equated with the Augustinian
conception of the militant church as God's saving will on earth.
Instead, its failings and abuses were to be interpreted as a falling
away from Christ, which could only be overcome by restoring the
visible church to the apostolic pattern of his earthly life. Christ,
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therefore, rather than any human representative, was not only the
true head of the church in his divinity, but the judge of the visible
church in his humanity. This was a measure of the distance which it
had travelled from the traditional conception, and a supreme irony
that it came from the appeal to the figure of Christ as a man. That
appeal, being founded on the Bible, also gave the Bible a further role
as the institutional arbiter of the canonical forms of Christian life as
well as the doctrinal arbiter of Christian belief. In combination with a
diversity of outlooks-the apocalyptic expectations of the Franciscan
Spirituals and other Joachimists, and later the Hussite Brotherhoods,
the historical interpretations of the Waldensians and Marsilius of
Padua, the denunciations of Dante, among others-the Bible
provided the prescriptions for the church's reform to the exclusion of
all non-scriptural, purely human ordinances contained in canon law.
That was at no time in the Middle Ages a doctrine of scriptura sola;
the appeal to Christ's example was also an appeal to apostolic
tradition. The first was in defence of the second, and for its
restoration, not for some new departure in either doctrines or
institutions. Rather, it had as its accompaniment what was perhaps
the most universal of the new attitudes to religion in the fourteenth
century: the displacement of a purely institutional view of the church,
conceived in terms of the juridical and canonical authority of its
hierarchy, by faith in Christ through participation in his word in the
Bible. The distinction between those in orders and laymen was
secondary and-for the Waldensians, Hussites, Wycliffe and, in a
different way, Ockham-irrelevant. Far from spiritual office sanctifying its holder, it gave no guarantee of spiritual fittedness. The only
test of that was conformity to Christ's law contained in the Bible. Far,
then, from authority in the church residing exclusively in its
hierarchy, failure to live according to Christ could entail the
deposition of any or all of its members, and at the hands of laymen:
expedients given expression in conciliar theory in the later fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries in the need to resolve the Great Schism
(1378-1417), and a further sign of a wider and less exclusive
definition of the church, even if from a different inspiration.
Wycliffe's religious outlook evolved from the apostolic
inspiration. 3 To it, he brought a metaphysics of extreme realism
which invested all essence or natures with an independent and
indestructible existence as eternal archetypes in God. From that he
was able to conclude that the church, God's word in Scripture, and
the bread and wine in the eucharist, all existed, and continued to exist
truly in their archetypal reality, outside their visible transient
existence in this world with, as we shall see, far-reaching consequences. In giving his religious conceptions a metaphysical
foundation-and an extreme one which went further than any one
else in the same direction-Wycliffe arrived at new interpretations of
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the church, its relation to Scripture, and the eucharist, which
reinforced the more extreme conclusions drawn from the apostolic
ideal-above all by Marsilius of Padua, two generations before him,
in his Defensor Pacis published in 1324.
In common with Marsilius and most of the upholders of an ideal
apostolic church, the centre of Wycliffe's religious doctrines was the
relation of the Bible to the church. That was not, as used to be
believed, from upholding a doctrine of scriptura sola, any more than
it was among his contemporaries and predecessors. Wycliffe certainly
revered the Bible as the repository of all truth eternally given. But of
itself that would hardly have undermined the church if he had
not-again like his predecessors and contemporaries-at the same
time denied the church's authority. He did so from an application of
his metaphysical principle to apostolic principles. On the one hand,
the Bible as God's word was true in itself for all time. On the other
hand, the church in its unchanging archetypal being was to be sought
not in its temporal form in the world, but in the essence in which God
had eternally conceived it--<>ut of the world. The true nature of the
Bible and the church were not therefore contradictory; but since only
in the Bible was God's eternal word revealed in this world, it must be
taken to point to the true nature of the church, which is not to be
found in this world. The truth of the Bible was ever-present in its
every word, although Wycliffe was compelled, by the arguments of
opponents at Oxford, to modify his earlier strictly literal interpretation. Every part of it nevertheless had to be accepted absolutely
without qualification; it contained all that was to be known, and it
could not be modified. 4 Its truths, though, were not all equally
accessible, and it needed the help of reason, as it conformed to
Wycliffe's own brand of metaphysical truths, and the testimony of the
saints and canonical authorities, among whom Augustine was
pre-eminent, to elicit its implicit meanings. Together they constituted
the sensus catholicus, a further indication that Wycliffe did not take
the Bible alone in isolation from authentic catholic tradition. 5 It was
the purely human laws of the recent church which he opposed. In
order to combat them, as well as any wrong interpretations-even
among the Fathers-every believer had an obligation to know
Scripture and defend it. That was where biblical fundamentalism bit:
it meant the exclusion of the visible church in its existing postapostolic form from the dialogue between the believer and tradition.
In its place was God's Word fittingly interpreted; it became the
mediator between God and man, and even when it could not be
comprehended, its words must nevertheless be adhered to.
It was there, in appealing to Scripture over the heads of the
hierarchy and at the same time disavowing the hierarchy in the name
of Scripture, that the force of Wycliffe's doctrine of the Bible lay. If
the reason was historical, in the post-apostolic church's betrayal of
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Christ's teachings, the grounds were metaphysical. They provided
him with the means for rejecting the present visible church in the
name of its true archetypal reality, which existed independently and
eternally. He thereby translated Augustine's eschatological division
of the faithful into the two cities, into an eternal metaphysical
division between the damned and the saved. Where St Augustine, in
his City of God, had treated them all as members of the church in this
world, Wycliffe foreshortened the process by making them from the
outset what they were for all eternity. Only the elect, therefore, were
ever part of the church, even in this world; and the damned were
forever excluded from it. Each represented a separate reality which
could not even merge temporally. 6
The effect was to transform the traditional meaning of the church
from the communion of all believers into the body of the electWycliffe's definition. Those who were truly of it were bound together
eternally by the grace of predestination, enabling them to remain in a
state of election until the end, immune from the consequences of
mortal sin. And the church was in being wherever the elect were.
Like everything else it had always existed archetypally, and so before
the incarnation. So correspondingly had the damned; they were
equally of one congregation--composed of the three classes of
infidels, heretics, and those not chosen-with Antichrist at their head.
In lacking the grace of election, their grace in this world, however
great, did not suffice for salvation; the~ therefore remained in mortal
sin, even when temporally in grace. Each body was accordingly
eternal and its membership irrevocable.
The overriding consequence of their division was the denial of any
visible identity to the church. In contrast to his insistence upon
the sovereignty of every word in Scripture, reiterated in work after
work, Wycliffe equally never ceased to stress that, in this world,
neither the saved nor the damned could be known, save by a special
revelation. 8 In the context of Wycliffe's conception, such ignorance
was disruptive of any ecclesiastical authority. If only the chosen were
of the church, and they could not be known, there was no reason for
accepting any visible priestly authority, or indeed for such authority
at all, since in keeping with Wycliffe's metaphysics, the saved and the
damned remained what they were, regardless of what happened in
this world.
Wycliffe fully accepted those implications. On his definition, the
church needed neither priests nor sacraments, merely conformity to
God's Word and catholic tradition in the sense defined earlier. Yet
Wycliffe could not entirely abandon himself to the full rigour of his
own doctrine. He neither went the whole way in rejecting the
sacraments or the hierarchy, nor was he prepared to leave those who
violated God's law to their future judgement by God. Like so many
later medievals, he was obsessed by the presence of Antichrist in the
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church, which the outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378 appeared to
confirm; and Wycliffe, in the growing stress of his hostility towards all
forms of religious authority in his last years, came to identify the
whole endowed church with Antichrist as the church of the damned.
There was therefore an ambivalence in Wycliffe's attitude to the
church, between his metaphysics and his moral and religious
attitudes, which finally became irreconcilable. On the one hand,
since the church was constituted of elect, who were unknown, there
could be no warrant for the authority of any pope, prelate or priest;
they might all be of the damned, and if they were (itself beyond
visible proof) they should not be obeyed. At the same time, equally
destructive of the notion of a hierarchy, every member of the elect, as
alone of the true church, could be ordained of God, and so any
layman could receive orders from him. As Wycliffe expressed it,
there was no need to be a cleric in order to be a priest,9 a view echoed
over the preceding three centuries by every heretical group and to be
re-echoed by the Lollards and the Hussites, taking it to the threshold
of the Reformation. That gave a licence for making God's word in
the Bible the sole criterion of truth and authority in conformity with
the sensus catholicus. On the other hand, Wycliffe, for all his
willingness to discount the hierarchy as metaphysically unverifiable,
could not resist applying the same catholic sense to judge it,
according to whether a priest or pope conformed to Christ's teaching
known in God's Word. Fundamentalism was made to serve pragmatism as well as metaphysics. Logically it flawed his system; psychologically it gave him the best of two worlds, which he exploited to the full.
He at once denied that any pope or ~riest could claim to exercise
authority without a special revelation (itself beyond visible proof)
and he used the Bible as authority for denying most of the attributes
of the existing church-its wealth, hierarchy, coercive power,
independent jurisdiction, the very existence of offices such as those of
the pope and cardinals for being unscriptural-and to condemn those
involved in them as betrayers of Christ. Here Wycliffe drew upon the
apostolic ideal as enunciated above all by Marsilius of Padua,
although without mentioning his name.
With Marsilius he saw the cause of the church's loss of its original
apostolic purity in the so-called Donation of Constantine, an
eighth-century forgery but taken as authentic until exposed by
Laurenzo Valla in 1440, purporting to be the first Christian emperor's
legacy to the church, in the person of the pope, of his western
possessions. For Wycliffe, with characteristic lack of constraint, Pope
Sylvester I, in accepting them, committed the crime of secularization,
leading to the growth of a 'Caesarian' hierarchy, civil involvement
and priestly avarice, the worst of all heresies. The only path of return
to Christ was for the church to renounce that property and
jurisdiction for ever. 11 In Wycliffe's culminating theological phase, in
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the last eight years of his life, beginning with De Civili Dominio, that
demand became a call to disendowment as the accompaniment of his
offensive against the contemporary church. In his De Potestate Pape,
written in 1379, it led to a rejection of the church hierarchy
altogether: both on theological grounds, that spiritual power was of
its nature entirely independent of human agency; and on the scriptural grounds, already developed by Marsilius of Padua, to deny the
Petrine basis of papal primacy or indeed, as already mentioned, the
scriptural basis for the existence of popes and cardinals at all. Both
grounds confirmed his metaphysical grounds, formulated just previously in his De Ecclesia, for refusing an inherent claim to office to
any pope or priest as lacking an inherent title to membership of the
church. Metaphysically, theologically, and scripturally, the path to
religious authority was barred; morally it led undeviatingly to
Antichrist and eternal damnation. As with Marsilius, only the layman
could win. But where for Marsilius it was as a citizen of a republic, for
Wycliffe it was as an individual member of the true church-the saved
layman-or as king, who was also the ruler of the church as well as of
his temporal subjects, a difference which at once expressed a
different ecclesiology and a different political tradition. What was
common to both was the same appeal to an apostolic view of the
church to deny it, in the name of Christ, any independent temporal
dominion or juridicial standing, thereby striking at the very institutional existence of the contemporary church as it had developed since
the so-called Gregorian reform in the eleventh century. For both
Marsilius and Wycliffe reform of the church consisted in its
dissolution and disendowment by the lay power.
In Wycliffe's case it received a theological justification in the
superior authority which the king had received from God. There,
too, he went further than anyone else. In his De Officio Regis,
written also in 1379, he compared the difference between the king's
power and the church's power to the difference between Christ's
divinity and Christ's humanity. 12 The king, as God's vicar, stood
apart from the rest of mankind; to resist him was to sin. Even tyrants
were divinely ordained and had to be suffered, provided the evil was
not to God, 13 a familiar Augustinian argument, which was again
reinforced by Clirist's-rather than Paul's-injunction to obey the
king. Unlike Augustine, though, Wycliffe shared the view of
Aquinas that kingship or lordship was inherent in all human
association and had existed before the Fall. Since the church's
secularization, that lordship extended to the church's temporalities,
over which the king could exercise the same coercive power as he had
received from God over all his subjects. It included the power to
correct and banish evil priests, sequestrate church property, even
demolish churches in an emergency and convert them into towers for
defence. The entire church must be obedient to the king-including
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John Wycliffe's Religious Doctrines
the pope over matters of patronage-as the saints were during their
time in the world. Whereas a pope could be deposed, disobeyed, corrected and denied, to lay rulers there must be universal submission.
Once again the demands of practical morality overrode metaphysics and ecclesiology; metaphysically there was no more means of
knowing whether a king was damned or saved than a priest.
Wycliffe's doctrine of royal power, in his De Officio Regis, thereby
effectively superseded his earlier doctrine of dominion, in De Civili
Dominio, dating from 1376, that only grace could confer temporal
lordship. 15 On the one hand, the church was excluded from civil and
spiritual jurisdiction on metaphysical and biblical grounds. On the
other, kings and secular lords, to whom the doctrine of dominion and
grace could have applied with most force, were expressly endowed by
Wycliffe with divinely ordained authority, the sanction for which he
found, not surprisingly, in Scripture, with everything else. Even
without it, his notion of dominion and grace, which he had adapted
from Richard FitzRalph, was singularly devoid of immediacy for
exactly the same reason as was his notion of the saved or damned
pope or layman. Like the rest of Wycliffe's treatment of the church
hierarchy, more tangible means were needed to give effect to his
beliefs than a general embargo on illegitimate lordship.
For that reason it is misleading to associate Wycliffe's developed
outlook with the doctrine of dominion and grace. The reason for its
persistence was that extracts from his De Civili Dominio, containing
it, were sent by William Courtenay, then Bishop of London, to Pope
Gregory XI in 1377, following Wycliffe's summons by Courtenay for
preaching against William of Wykeham, probably at John of Gaunt's
behest. Their censure by Gregory, in 1378, stuck. But the real
significance of the event was that it marked a turning-point in
Wycliffe's thinking into the full-fledged anti-sacerdotalism, just
stopping short of anti-sacramentalism, which characterized the last
six years of his life. It had its final outcome in his doctrine of the
eucharist.
Unlike the doctrine of dominion and grace, his view of the
eucharist grew directly out of his metaphysics. Its formulation in De
apostasia and De eucharistia, both written in 1379, Jed at once to the
end of his career at Oxford for the censure-again not of heresythat it incurred, and set the seal on his opposition to the
contemporary church. After his withdrawal from Oxford to Lutterwarth in 1381, he spent the remaining three years until his death
indicting the entire ecclesiastical and religious hierarchy-the Caesarian clergy-including his erstwhile allies, the Friars, as Antichrist.
Foremost among Antichrist's badges was their support for the
doctrine of transubstantiation. Paradoxically, its denial by Wycliffe
also became the badge of heresy among Wycliffe's Lollard followers,
and the Hussites, but without making a Wycliffe a heretic.
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The question of transubstantiation largely dominated the thinking
of his last five years. 16 For the previous fifteen years he had tried
various ways of reconciling it with his own doctrine of the
indestructibility of being. His own attempts, singular though they
were, were, like his other doctrines, part of a long succession going
back to the eleventh century. Nor did he ever deny the universally
accepted theological truth that the bread and wine of the host became
converted into Christ's body and blood. What he rejected was the
accompanying belief that, after their conversion, all that remained of
the bread and wine were their appearances, together with the
accepted explanation, deriving from Aquinas, that the appearances
were maintained by the 'quantity' belonging to the real bread and
wine before their transubstantiation. Ockham had also challenged
that explanation-not the occurrence-on opposite grounds to
Wycliffe, namely, that all being was individual substance which was
inseparable from 'quantity'.
For Wycliffe the inseparability of quantity, or any other accident,
from substance was ontologically impossible from the nature of
being. To begin with, an accident, whether a quantity or a quality,
could not exist without a substance, because it was defined in relation
to a substance. To make one separate from the other would also
undermine all knowledge, since it would destroy all certainty and
make everything illusory by not being able to pass from appearances
to their underlying reality. It would also lead to idolatry in
worshipping accidents, as that which was inessential and the lowest
form of existence, instead of Christ's body. Conversely, to identify
the real substantial bread and wine with Christ's body and blood
would lead to the opposite blasphemy of associating him with what
was material and corruptible. His blood would then jmtrify, or
become sour with the degeneration of the bread and wine, be broken
and eaten by priests or animals, and his blood spilt if the wine was
upset. It also led to the supreme sacrilege that the priest, through
speaking the words of consecration, could make Christ's body,
whereas in fact the words were merely an instrument through which
God worked the transformation-a further instance of Wycliffe's
rejection of human powers in effecting the sacraments. Finally, the
disappearance or annihilation of the bread and wine would mean the
destruction of all matter-whose archetype they shared-and so the
destruction of the universe, implicating God in the annihilation of his
own creation.
To this characteristic combination of the tangible and impalpable,
Wycliffe brought his own solution, which was that transubstantiation
consisted not in the physical transformation of the bread and wine
into something else-Christ's body and blood--but the coming of
something new in Christ's advent to the bread and wine. That advent
transubstantiated the bread and wine, not physically, but figuratively
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John Wycliffe's Religious Doctrines
or sacramentally, as now containing, or coexisting with, Christ's
presence. It was a real presence, but spiritual, although Wycliffe
never specified what that meant. Hence the transformation of the
bread and wine was both natural and supernatural; they remained
bread and wine but they also became sacramentally Christ's body and
blood-in Wycliffe's words, 'The body of Christ in the form of bread
and wine'. Like Christ, it had a dual nature: in its earthly aspect as
bread and wine, in its divine aspect as Christ's body. It thereby came
close to the later doctrine of consubstantiation.
Independently of the tenability of Wycliffe's explanation, he at
least thought that he had not denied the truth of the doctrine; and as
with all his positions, he invoked the sensus catholicus in his support,
arraigning the modern church for being in error. Nevertheless, his
doctrine of the eucharist became one of the hallmarks of subsequent
Lollard heresy, known as 'remanence' for affirming the continuance
of the substance of the bread and wine. As such it was perhaps a
measure of how far Wycliffe had departed from orthodoxy. While
each of his positions was founded in contemporary attitudes or
traditional doctrine, their ultimate effect was the rejection of
traditional doctrine over the central questions of the nature of the
church, the role of the Bible, the authority of temporal rulers, and
the eucharist. In every case the appeal was to the one palpable
criterion of God's word in the Bible to supplant the authority of the
church by individual judgement, and it was founded upon a set of
metaphysical beliefs which effectively freed individual believers,
kings, the sacraments and the eucharist, and finally belief itself, from
the mediation of the church. That Wycliffe never went to the point of
complete emancipation from its authority, but sought spiritual reform
within its insitutional renewal, kept him within the Middle Ages while
pointing in the direction of the Reformation.
GORDON LEIT is Professor of History in the University of York
NOTES
1 For the background, see G. Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester
1967), voi.I, Prologue; R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (London 1976);
M. D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy (London 1977).
2 See G. Leff, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook (New York 1976), ch. 4.
3 For a fuller account of what follows see G. Leff, 'John Wyclif, the Path to
Dissent', Proceedings of the British Academy, LII, 1966, pp.143-80 and Leff,
Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, II, ch.7.
4 De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 3 vols (Wycliffe Society (WSJ, London 1905-7), I,
pp.l-2 and passim.
5 Trialogus (Oxford 1869), bk III, ch.31.
6 De Ecclesia (WS 1886), pp.2, 7.
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7 ibid., pp.8, 63, 99, 102-3, 106, 139.
8 ibid., p.251; also De Civili Dominio, 3 vols (WS 1885, 1900, 1903-4), I, p.25.
9 De Officio Regis (WS 1887), pp.l34, 149; also De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, II,
p.248; De Ecclesia, p.577; De Eucharistia (WS 1892), pp.98-9.
10 De Potestate Pape (WS 1907), p.179; De Ecclesia, p.31; De Civili Dominio, I,
p.387.
11 Opera Minora (WS 1913), pp.204, 206; De Veri/ate Sacrae Scripturae, I, p.70; De
Civili Dominio, III, pp.59, 217; De Blasphemia (WS 1893), p.61.
12 De Officio Regis, pp.l3, 16, 137, 143.
13 ibid., pp.4-6, 346.
14 ibid., pp.61, 64, 71, 84, 97,188,207.
15 Voi.I, passim.
16 For what follows, see Leff, 'John Wyclif, the Path to Dissent', pp.l77-9; Leff,
Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, II, pp.549-57; and G. Leff, 'Ockham and
Wyclif on the Eucharist', Reading in Medieval Studies, II, 1966, pp.1-13 and
references.
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